Terre des hommes has been engaged in fighting child trafficking since 2001 and, guided by the obvious fact that «children are not merchandise», makes this struggle one of its main priorities. In today's world, Terre des hommes is active in a dozen cases of exploitation influx.

The figures generally accepted vary between 300'000 and 1.2 million children who become victims each year. Cut off from their family environment and protection, they are taken away to places unknown in order to be exploited sexually or as cheap labour, submissive and menial.

Their most basic rights are ignored or scorned. Some of these children lose all their natural human dignity and become the property of another person. Call it by its proper name: slavery.

Terre des hommes's understanding of this problem starts with the simple denunciation of perverse and criminal practices. From its own experience, Terre des hommes has observed that child exploitation is often the result of social disintegration or the consequence of unequal social organization. Each situation is a special combination of various factors (poverty, weakness or absence of any system to protect children, fundamental needs which are not met, dreams of migration, types of discrimination, etc.) which lead to this serious violation of child rights.


Terre des hommes' actions
Terre des hommes stands against and resolutely fights this inhuman practice. Its interventions are in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Each program seeks to strengthen and complement any child protection already in existence, and helps resistance set up by certain members of the involved community, as well as by other outside parties (nation or international organizations).

Terre des hommes intervenes against a dozen exploitation influxes (displacement of children from one region to another to exploit them), seeks to reduce the number of children displaced for exploitation (prevention), and protects the children who have already become victims (victim assistance). Our intervention is carried out at difference stages of the exploitation process.
At the source – in the home towns of these children, at the heart of the problem – where they are taken to and exploited; and further downstream – where the children make a new life when they have got away from being exploited.

And so Terre des hommes has become an ambassador for these victims. In the framework of formal or selective alliances and based on results from the field (lessons learned, successes but also failures), Terre des hommes seeks to convince the authorities, the prescribers, the general public as well as the communities concerned, that child exploitation is not inevitable and that basic change at a large-scale level (national, regional or international) could alter the life of hundreds of thousand children.

Since 2002 it has thus been our annual appeal campaign for national funding which has proposed support for our program against child exploitation to the Swiss people. At the level of the Terre des hommes movement, this same fight can also be counted in with the international campaign led by the International Federation of Terre des hommes since 2001, with the participation of nearly one thousand local and national NGO's. They combine activities and consciousness raising, work to appeal for and give direct help to victims in more than 20 countries.